The Boredom of Outrage
There was a time when anger was fuel. It moved the body into action, disregarding direction or intention. It organized nights out, plans, and letters believed to change things. The alarms felt clear, and action felt obvious.
Now the alerts are blurry with another headline, another urgent update, another polished promise to do better this time. You feel a tightening in your chest that almost immediately flattens into apathy. It’s not indifference; it’s caring on repeat until the circuit wears down.
Outrage lost its edge when it became content. Concern is choreographed into deliberate, inauthentic scripts—post the right thing at the right time. Hit send. Repeat. The causes are still real, but the performance thins the feeling.
Authenticity gets washed out by performed tears and constant confessions to a faceless crowd. Then comes the disappointment—watching people you love fall for it. People you thought were immune to tricks. Folks who saw through the last set of lies but swallow the next set whole because the packaging changed. It’s sobering to realize that intelligence doesn’t inoculate anyone against the repetition and fatigue the machine relies on.
After years in government and in the long school of adulthood and motherhood, the villains have a new shape. They look like memos that never land and meetings that could have been emails. They sound like, “That’s not our department.” They hide in policies and legislation passed by people who never read beyond the first page. At home, the villains are dirty dishes and full trash cans. They live in the shrug, in quiet contempt, in the way a simple request becomes a maze. Not cartoon bad guys—just the soft theft of time, attention, dignity, and sleep.
Cue the boredom. Not because the world is fine, but because the world keeps asking for adrenaline without offering relief. Sometimes, numbness is the white flag the nervous system waves when the frequency stays too high for too long. It’s a sign: rest or burn. Put the phone down. Touch dough, dirt, your child’s hair (my personal favorite), a dog’s ear. Pull up a track from when you were nineteen that still resets the room, and dance in the living room. Reconnect with yourself and what’s real for you.
Many of us trained ourselves to be fine. We learned to mute anger so well that no one, ourselves included, sees the cost. You want to think you didn’t stop caring—but you did. Now the work is to bring anger back as a tool. Let it point, not perform. Let it mark a boundary, name a need, and steer you toward what matters.
If you can feel this, treat it as permission. Stay present without staying silent. Choose one place to act and do it cleanly. Rest to recharge your signals. Turn the volume down on noise, not on truth. Let anger compost into direction, and direction into one concrete move you can finish.
For deeper reflection on anger, explore The Rage & Reckoning Workbook — a companion piece to this work.
Exercise: Signal vs. Noise Check
List three alarms that have been shouting for your attention this week. Write them out exactly as they appear in your feed or inbox.
Circle the one that is actually yours to carry. If none are, write “not mine.”
Name one physical reaction that shows up when you engage with that alarm. Where does it live in your body?
Decide what stays and what stops.
What feeds your clarity?
What just drains it?
Reclaim your energy. End the exercise by doing one small, human act: fold laundry to music, wash your hands slowly, walk without headphones, breathe in fresh air until the static fades.
Affirmation:
I am not numb. I am done pretending every alarm deserves my adrenaline.
